Documents Hart, Robert A. 15 results

"Unlike the United States, Britain has no national laws regulating overtime hour assignment or compensation. Using individual-level data on male non-managerial workers from the 1998 British New Earnings Survey, the authors investigate relationships among the standard hourly wage rate, hourly earnings (including overtime), the overtime premium, and the length of overtime hours. They find that when overtime is accounted for, average hourly wage earnings are fairly uniform across firms in a given industry, because firms paying below-market-level straight-time wages tend to award above-market-level overtime premiums, and, conversely, firms paying above-market-level straight-time wages provide below-market-level overtime premiums."

"Under annualised hours' contracts (AHCs), workers and management agree to the length and scheduling of working hours over a 12-month period. Such contracts have been widely seen as a potentially important way to achieving greater labour market flexibility and enhanced efficiency in work organisation. There exists very little empirical work on these contracts and this study is intended to provide insights into their British labour market role and potential. Especially for workers who are not in management or a profession, the costs of switching to AHCs are substantial. The enterprises that are likely to gain from the switch are those that (a) experience significant fluctuations in output/service demand and (b) desire to utilise plant and space more intensively over the calendar year. In this respect, plants incorporating complex shift operations are particularly associated with AHCs."

"Using the British New Earnings Survey Panel Data for 1975–2001, the authors estimate the wage cyclicality (the degree to which wage levels rise and fall with economic upturns and downturns) of three groups: job stayers, within-company job movers, and between-company job movers. Wages of internal movers, they find, were slightly more procyclical, and wages of external movers considerably more procyclical, than those of stayers. The greater cyclicality of movers' wages is particularly apparent for private sector workers and persons not covered by collective agreements. Nevertheless, because job stayers comprised about 90% of all observations in this large sample of British workers, the procyclicality of their wages was the predominant determinant of the overall procyclical pattern found across all groups. Thus, the analysis does not support the implication of some rigid wage models that employers use job title changes to adjust wages to the business cycle."

"This paper offers a contract-based theory to explain the determination of standard hours, overtime hours and overtime premium pay. We expand on the wage contract literature that emphasises the role of firm-specific human capital and that explores problems of contract efficiency in the face of information asymmetries between the firm and the worker. We first explore a simple wage–hours contract without overtime and show that incorporating hours into the contract may itself produce efficiency gains. We then show how the introduction of overtime hours, remunerated at premium rates, can further improve contract efficiency. Our modelling outcomes in respect of the relationship between the overtime premium and the standard wage rate relate closely to earlier developments in hedonic wage theory. Throughout, we emphasise the intuitive reasoning behind the theory and we also supply relevant empirical evidence. Mathematical derivations are provided in an Appendix."

"Based largely on industry-level aggregate statistics, the prevailing view, and one that has strongly influenced macroeconomic thought, is that real wages during the cycle containing the Great Depression are either acyclical or countercyclical. Does this finding hold-up when more micro data are employed? We examine this question based on detailed blue-collar workers' company payroll data for a large section of the British engineering and metal working industries. We distinguish between pieceworkers and timeworkers, with pieceworkers accounting for over half the workforce. For the period 1927 to 1937, the two pay groups are broken down into 14 occupations, and 48 travel-to-work geographical districts. We estimate wage and hours cyclicality in respect of the national unemployment rate as well as the district rates. Weekly hours and real weekly earnings are found to be strongly procyclical. Real hourly earnings of pieceworkers are also significantly procyclical. The roles of standard and overtime hours are crucial to these findings. "

"We compare two policies of increasing British state pension provision: (a) increase the pensionable age of men and women, (b) maintain the existing retirement age but require older workers to work longer per-period hours. There are reasons for policy makers to give serious consideration to the under-researched alternative (b). First, from wage - hours contract theory we know that there are potential gains to both workers and firms of allowing hours to rise in work experience. Second, there is strong evidence that job satisfaction rises in age. Third, there has in any case been a significant overall increase in the hours supplied by older workers in the last two decades. We review the relevant theory, model the trade-off between later retirement versus increased work intensity, produce relevant background facts, and provide estimates of the policy trade-offs. "